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It Could Only Happen in Montreal

I was riding the elevator yesterday, when I spotted Attention Screen's Mark Flynn and Chris Jones. I jumped out of the lift and asked, "What's up?"

"We are looking for large men," Chris said.

?!?

"We need to get the piano onto the stage," Mark explained. "It's on the floor."

I volunteered and they went to find more brawn. Ten minutes later, a gang of 15 Montrealers entered, sent by FSI show organizer Michel Plante. We surrounded the piano, chanted "One, two, allez" and cleaned and jerked that sucker up and over the stage lip. One minute later, they were gone…

Lucky Number 781

Wadia was showing its almost ready-to-ship CD/SACD player, the $15,000 781. (A 781i with digital inputs and outputs is also in the works.) The 781 uses two signal processors feeding a programmable gate array and the company's proprietary DigiMaster 2.5 upsampling software. This, Wadia claims, results in a data rate of 1.4112 million samples per second. The 781 also sports Clocklink jitter reduction for both CD and SACD.

Driving an Audio Research Reference 3 preamp, a pair of ARC Reference 610T monoblocks, and Sonus Faber Stradivari homage loudspeakers, the 781 sounded as dynamic…

The Calm Before Happy Hour

What does this photo of the bar in the Sheraton illustrate? Well, I could say that it provides further confirmation of the fact that it snowed in Montreal. But the real reason is that I just like this shot, taken with the Sigma 15mm fisheye on the Canon 5D, and thought that audiophiles that are also into photography (and there are many such in my acquaintance) might enjoy seeing it.

Well, Wouldn't You Just Know It?

It's been said often enough to be considered as a truism that FSI is an occasion for snow: at the show's opening, during the show, or at least when the show is closing. But it looked like this year was going to be an exception; the weather forecast for the three days of the show called for temperatures well above freezing, with rain on Friday.

And so Friday rolled around and—guess what?—it started snowing at around noon and continued the rest of the day. The picture accompanying this blog item may look suspiciously like one that was part of my show report last year, but I can…

Ah, Puccini

dCS is known for its superb-sounding but stratospherically-priced digital source components—prices in the $50k+ range for a transport/DAC combination. While their new Puccini one-box CD/SACD player won't be a candidate for Budget Component of the Year, its $22,000 price represents low end for dCS. But don't start spending all the money you've saved by buying the Puccini rather than the more expensive dCS offerings: there is a matching external clock component upgrade that will be available in the near future. No price has been determined yet, but you can be sure that it will not be in…

Lyngdorf: Getting It Corrected

I've heard demonstrations of Lyngdorf's digital room correction components before, and had been impressed by it, but never as much as at the demo held at this year's FSI. Adrian Low, whose Toronto store, Audio Excellence, is a dealer for Lyngdorf, played a recording of a male voice that was so bloated in the midbass as to be virtually unlistenable. That was with the Lyngdorf room correction bypassed. The sound was totally transformed when the room correction circuitry was engaged: the midbass boom, endemic to the smaller rooms on the Sheraton's upper floors, was gone, and while it was…

Neeper's a Keeper

Conventional audio marketing wisdom has it that any new company with a single product, selling at a high price, will have a really rough time establishing distribution and picking up dealers. But this apparently did not deter Kim Neeper Rasmussen. The Neeper Perfection One is a two-and-a-half way floorstander of modest size, with a 1.5" ScanSpeak ring-radiator tweeter and two 5.5" custom ScanSpeak midrange/bass units, each speaker weighing 30kg (66 lbs). A major feature of the design is that the cabinet walls are all non-parallel to each other, an approach to resonance-control that…

A Turntable from Calibre

There were lots of turntables at the show, but the one that intrigued me the most was the Calibre Mk.101, from Audio Excellence, the Toronto-area dealer, which is making its first foray into the turntable business. The Calibre Mk.101 has a with a marble plinth, 1.5" thick acrylic platter, AC motor with speed regulation, high-quality polished bearing, and looks elegant without being ostentatious. The price of $1999 includes a good-quality arm, with further arm upgrades available. Audio Excellences stated aim in introducing the Calibre Mk.101 is "the best reproduction of records at the…

Just Sayin' Is All

FSI has a very high percentage of good-sounding rooms, compared to most audio shows. True, the smaller hotel-roomed sized rooms above the concourse levels, all had a hooty 150Hz coloration, but that just meant that, when an exhibitor successfully dealt with it—as did Ken Rasmussen of Neeper—those rooms really stood out.

Interestingly, every room I visited that was set up by audio dealers Coup de Foudre and Son or Filtronique sounded superb. Part of it was that those dealer have pretty fancy lines—Wilson, VTL, Transparent, et al for Coup and Ayre, Audio Research, Wadia, Nagra, and Shunyata…

Feel the Emotion

Emanuel Lafleur had a pair of his $8000/pair (estimated final price) stand-mounted two-way X1 monitors set up in the press room. Great for reaching the press, not so great for good sound, since the press room was dominated by a huge roundtable right where the sweet spot would have been. Nevertheless, the X2s sounded impressive enough that both John Marks and I were captivated.

Built by laminating cherry plywood, the cabinets are impressively dense and are quite lovely. The sound was balanced and detailed, but not fatiguing. The X2 had lots of body and a surprising amount of "jump…